I’m headed to Vienna this weekend for the annual Roboexotica “cocktail robotics” festival, a maker show for people who build robots that drink, mix cocktails, light cigarettes, make bar conversation amd perform miscellaneous cocktail-related robotic activities. The event is put on by Monochrom and Shifz, two mad and wonderful net-art collectives based in Vienna’s Museumsquartier on Electric Avenue.

I’ll be speaking on Friday night at Taugshow, Monochrom’s not-a-talkshow, and I’ll be around the conference all day on Saturday. Hope to see you!

Ghost in the Machine:

Symposium at Roboexotica 2007

In ancient Greece, thinking was projected outwards into the gods, who vicariously acted out human conflicts. The pre-Socratics were already thinking about nature and its principles. Plato later explained: “All that we can know are phenomena. Behind these appearances are the eternal forms, which embody true being. These are to us in principle unknowable, which means that our thinking is deception.” Thus the dualism of thinking and being was more or less established.

Aristotle disagreed with him, believing that the (divine) forms are found in living beings. Although the soul is moved by another (God is the “unmoved mover”), it also moves itself, and thus possess a certain degree of freedom. To put it bluntly: according to Plato, God was there first and created humans; Aristotle would say: humans were there first and they created their gods. According to the dualistic viewpoint, mind and matter are two different things that are independent of one another. Contrastingly, the monistic view holds that these are only two different aspects of an identical phenomenon. And yet regardless of which worldview one prefers, the question remains: Who was there first? Did the mind create the brain, or is it just a product of neural activity? For the English mind researcher John Eccles it was clear: “The mind plays on the brain as the pianist plays on the piano.”

So, what’s the deal with the mind? What is mind really? A function of the mind or a nonmaterial form of being? How are such questions treated in popular culture? How does technology approach these issues? And what does all of this have to do with robots?

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Internet Evolution’s just posted my latest column for them, on “Internet Immune Systems.” We’re designing more and more automated defenses for the Internet, systems that shut you down or block you if you appear to be doing something naughty, but the problem is that while the defenses are automatic, the appeals process is decidedly manual.

The tripwire that locks you out was fired-and-forgotten two years ago by an anonymous sysadmin with root access on the whole network. The outsourced help-desk schlub who unlocks your account can’t even spell “tripwire.” The same goes for the algorithm that cut off your credit card because you got on an airplane to a different part of the world and then had the audacity to spend your money. (I’ve resigned myself to spending $50 on long-distance calls with Citibank every time I cross a border if I want to use my debit card while abroad.)

This problem exists in macro- and microcosm across the whole of our technologically mediated society. The “spamigation bots” run by the Business Software Alliance and the Music and Film Industry Association of America (MAFIAA) entertainment groups send out tens of thousands of automated copyright takedown notices to ISPs at a cost of pennies, with little or no human oversight. The people who get erroneously fingered as pirates (as Motion Picture Association of America CEO Dan Glickman charmingly puts it, “When you go fishing with a dragnet, sometimes you catch a dolphin.”) spend days or weeks convincing their ISPs that they had the right to post their videos, music, and text-files.

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My latest Guardian column, “Warhol is turning in his grave,” describes the photography ban in place at the Pop Art Portraits show at the National Portrait Gallery in London. It’s an amazing show, and practically every work hung in it violates someone’s copyrights, trademarks, or both (this is pop art, after all). In a stunning display of either Dadaism or irony-impairment, the gallery has hung the show with a “no photography” policy (not a “no flash photography” policy, either), and the even extend the ban to the “no photography” signs themselves, which, they claim, are copyrighted works.

Any gallery that bans reproducing Warhol on the grounds that you’ll violate his copyright should be forced into an off-site, all-day irony training session.

So what’s the message of the show? Is it a celebration of remix culture, revelling in the endless possibilities opened up by appropriating and reusing images without permission?

Or is it the epitaph on the tombstone of the sweet days before the UN set up the World Intellectual Property Organization and the ensuing mania for turning everything that can be sensed and recorded into someone’s property?

Does this show – paid for with public money, with some works that are themselves owned by public institutions – seek to inspire us to become 21st century pop artists, armed with cameraphones, websites and mixers, or is it supposed to inform us that our chance has passed and we’d best settle for a life as information serfs who can’t even make free use of what our eyes see and our ears hear?

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New fan-translations of my Creative-Commons-licensed story Scroogled continue to roll in: Piotr Wrzosinski’s Polish translation is the latest, joining earlier translations in French, Spanish, Russian, Persian, Bulgarian, German, and Dutch.

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My latest Locus column is online: “Creative Commons” explains the fundamentals of using CC licenses for people who are interested in the idea but haven’t tried it yet. I get a lot of email from people asking just how you apply licenses to your work.

After you check off a few boxes on the Creative Commons license form, you’ll get a page with the license for your work. This consists of a short block of computer code you paste into your book, image, web page, or what-have-you. This code displays a graphic badge showing the license you’ve chosen, with a link back to the license and a block of hidden “machine readable” text. This is text that search-engines can use to figure out which files are shared, and under which terms (you can limit searches on Flickr, Google, or Yahoo to only show Creative Commons licensed results).

Additionally, the machine-readable version links to two other versions of the licenses — a “human readable” plain-language version that can be understood by anyone, and a “lawyer-readable” version of small print that says the same thing in legally binding terms.

Creative Commons licenses are international — over 80 countries have their own CC projects — and something licensed under CC in the USA can be combined with Israeli, Indian, Brazilian, Spanish, British, South African and German CC works without violating the terms of any of their licenses.

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